1791 D.C. The Bill of Rights was ratified by the States. The process had begun two years earlier. It includes the right to bear arms in a well-ordered militia as a substitute for a standing army. Now that there is a standing army…..it would seem to follow that there is no need for this proviso.
1891 Springfield, Massachusetts, an illegal immigrant Canadian James Naismith devised the game of basketball, a sport that could be played indoors and was neither too tame nor too rough. He set the founding thirteen rules.
1893 NYC: Foreigner Anton Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E-minor, Opus 95, “From the New World,” was performed in New York City in an open rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. The world premier was the next day.
1905 St Petersburg, Russia, Pushkin House was established to preserve the cultural heritage of Alexander Pushkin, who is credited with creating Russian as literary language. We have been there.
1920 Geneva: Australia became a member of the League of Nations. Been to the League of Nations building in Geneva to read archives. Frank Morehouse’s superb novels featuring Edith followed.
14 December has a past
1751 Vienna: Hapsburg rulers founded the first military academy in the world, the Theresian Military Academy. We might see it next year.
1900 At the Physics Society in Berlin Max Planck presented a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law which became a corner stone of quantum theory.
1911 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole.
1926 Mystery writer Agatha Christie reappeared eleven days after being reported missing, with no memory of where she has been. Christie’s autobiography makes no reference to her disappearance.
1962 For the first time an earth probe, Mariner 2, flew by Venus.
‘Crime Doctor’ (22 June 1943)
1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.4 by 301 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Redemption.
An amnesia victim is rescued up by Lieutenant Tragg posing as a kindly, country doctor. Tragg tries all the plays in the script to rekindle Amnesia’s memory. No go. Time passes.
Victim gets depressed and is snapped out of it by a love interest, and Tragg challenges him to make something of himself. ‘Few men have a second chance and he should take it.’ This dramatic tension is well played.
Victim transforms himself into….[drum roll], the Crime Doctor, a combination of physician and psychologist. Ten years passes while he transforms.
Then in no time he has reformed innumerable criminals. All the while a mysterious stranger is lurking about who tells Crime Doctor that he knows he a faking amnesia. He is not, but he worries about what Lurker knows that he doesn’t.
Turns our Victim (aka Crime Doctor) was a criminal mastermind who made off with a fortune, when prosperity was just around the corner, and then he lost his memory and with it the loot. Lurker with two associates want a cut, even these ten years later.
Whew! Is this plot thick, or what? There are lumps in this gravy alright.
Victim recovers his memory, singlehandedly captures Lurker and gang, finds the dosh, and surrenders himself to the authorities.
He is put on trial as a split personality. Think Clockwork Orange. He is tried for what Victim/Villain did but the man on trial is pillar of virtue Crime Doctor. Get it? What the fraternity brothers got was a headache.
He admits Victim/Villain’s guilt while claiming Crime Doctor’s innocence. Both inhabit the same body! What to do? There is some nice satire about the journalists covering the trial. On Fox News Hillary is blamed.
Find him guilty and let him go, that’s what.
It is all nicely done, though disbelief has to be suspended with Victim, the 55-year old Warner Baxter, who is ostensibly 30 at the start. Whoa. Not only does he look 55, he also looks ill. He did eight of these programers.
Crime Doctor was a multimedia hit at the time. It ran in newspapers, over the airwaves of radio, and in this and the subsequent series of films.
‘Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery’ (March 1941)
1 hour and 9 minutes, rated 5.7 by 94 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Diverting
We open in China with a professional ventriloquist who is entrusted with a fortune in jewels to take from China to New York to raise money for Chinese war relief. But complications ensue.
The two dummies arrive in New York and the warm blooded one goes missing. Foul play is suspected by viewers. Inscrutable Anna May Wong arouses suspicion, but proclaims her innocence.
The local agent for the sale seeks the advice of Ellery Queen’s typist who brings EQ into it. There is some nice by-play between EQ and the typist who would like to be an assistant, and even a detective. EQ insists that he is writer and not a detective, and I agreed. This insistence riled the contemporary New York Times reviewer who was condescending and disdainful without a by-line. That august organ seems to specialise in reviewers who do not like movies.
Ralph Bellamy played EQ in this outing, and he does it pretty well, though the screenplay is repetitive.
‘The Mandarin Mystery’ (1936)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 5.3 by 286 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Snappy
Hidden in the title is Ellery Queen played to a ’T’ by Eddie Quillan. A rare Chinese Mandarin stamp is stolen and the body count starts. The courier delivering the stamp from China is robbed in her hotel room, and the Inspector Queen comes to investigate with Ellery in his wake.
Her intention was to sell the stamps to a private collector. When a rival collector offers twice as much the courier, strangely, declines. Meanwhile the offspring of the first collector oppose the purchase of another useless stamp which they see as squandering their inheritance.
There are locked rooms, posed cadavers, shadows lurking outside windows, and bumbling coppers. The dialogue is brisk; the direction is crisp; the players are engaging.
There is much coming and going, and more than one set of villains are on the prowl to confuse things, and me.
EQ comes to the rescue with smart alec remarks, and a keen eye for detail.
Spoiler: Turns out Collector One found that forgery paid better. His plan was to buy the Chinese stamp and them make forgeries and sell each on the black market for the purchase price. I think.
Franklin Pangborn, as ever, superbly plays the flighty hotel manager.
Ellery Queen stories were multi-media at the time, in print, over the radio, and on the silver screen.
13 December
1577 Plymouth, England: Sir Francis Drake went to attack Spanish shipping in the Pacific. To do so he had to circumnavigate the world. Silver from Peru was the major source of money for Spain at the time.
1642 New Zealand: Dutchman Abel Tasman reached the coast of South Island in New Zealand, and named it Staten Landt (States General). It was the default name Dutch explorers used, e.g., Staten Island in New York Habor. Cartographers back home changed the name to honour his home, Zeeland.
1902 Caracas, Venezuela: British and German ships bombard Venezuelan harbour forts to collect sovereign debts. Using the Monroe Doctrine, US President Theodore Roosevelt offered to arbitrate and successfully did so.
1955 Melbourne: Australian housewife, Dame Edna Everage, debuted. The character evolved over the years. The wardrobe, the gladioli, the glasses, the rings, came later. The lane in Melbourne below bears that name.
1972 The Moon: Apollo 17 was the sixth and the last time humans landed on the Moon. Eugene Cernan was the last man of twelve men to walk on the Moon.
12 December – Here is the day that was.
1694 London: the Royal Society censured Edmond Halley for suggesting that Noah’s flood might have been caused by the impact of a comet. Supernatural causes were preferred explanation.
1792 In Vienna, Franz Joseph Haydn gave the first lessons in composition to 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven. We hope to visit Vienna again in 2019 and pay homage to Ludi.
1874 D.C.: President U.S. Grant hosted the first state dinner at the White House and it was for visiting Hawaiian King David Kalakaua. Hawaii is our favourite place, apart from Newtown.
1953 Chuck Yeager flew two and a half times the speed of sound. He inspired Tom Wolfe.
Notice the X-plane and pilot in a pressure suit on the cover of the first edition. It is a marvellous book.
1980 NYC: Apple made its initial public offering on the stock market. It became the largest company in the US over the next generation. Ten years ago we migrated from the PC World to the Apple World and have never looked back.
11 December
1620 The Mayflower pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. Kate has been there.
1936 Edward VIII abdicated the throne of England.
1944 The Great Toronto snowstorm of 20 inches remains the worst blizzard experienced in that winter city. The death count increased to about twenty.
1946 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund was established, one of the many good things the United Nations does that gets little press.
2001 Race riots occurred in Cronulla in southern Sydney. A voter is pictured below.
‘Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century–The Faking of the Hitler “Diaries” (1987) by Robert Harris.
GoodReads meta-data is 402 pages, rated 3.9 by 827 raters.
Genre: Non-fiction
Verdict: Could not put it down.
The book reads like one of Harris’s historical novels with a cast of characters and skulduggery galore, but it is too incredible to be fiction. Only reality could combine such colossal stupidity, egotistical incompetence, and venomous hypocrisy. In short, it seems like a typical episode of Fox News.
The basics, for those born yesterday, are these. In 1983 there came to light the personal diaries kept for thirty years by one Adolf Hitler. Look him up. It was a sensation and a flock of carrion eaters landed on it to exploit the find.
It all started with an inveterate liar and forger who had eked out a living selling Nazi relics on the black market, since trade in such things was illegal in West Germany. When he could not get the real thing he learned to make replicas. His clients did not seem to notice, or mind if they did notice, so he kept at it. Since trading and possessing such items was illegal the clients did not seek expert opinion or dare to compare notes. Forger also discovered that the objects that commanded the highest prices were those connected personally to Hitler.
He followed the marks, and forged Hitler signatures, early letters, and paintings, a lot of paintings, hundreds. When asked he always said he got the goods from a contact in East Germany, whose name he had to protect because there the penalty for trading in Nazi relics in the DDR was capital.
One day a lowly reporter from the Stern magazine came along. He was a Nazi obsessive, and he bought a few items. Note, though Stern was at the time aligned with the Socialist Party, this reporter was a dreamy fantasist way down the pecking order.
He kept buying from Forger, no questions asked. Then Forger, on the look out for new ways to add value to his small business, broached the prospect of diaries. This was perfect for Fantasist. He tried to interest the editors of Stern in buying the diaries but they rejected them as preposterous and irrelevant. There were many previous examples of forged material from that era, and to their minds this was another pathetic example of that. They knew Fantastist for what he was and left it at that.
Fantastist did not give up easily. In time he by-passed the editors and made contact with the management of Stern. Stern was owned by a holding company which in turn was a subsidiary of the leviathan Bertelsmann corporation. Fantastist convinced Herr Decisivie, the chairman of the board, that this was the scoop of the century. To make it a scoop everything had to be kept secret. So Decisive consulted no one and gave Fantastist a blank cheque to get the diaries: No questions asked.
Fantastist went back to Forger and created a demand for diaries. Forger set to work at his usual standard. He bought ruled A4 school books and used the public records of Hitler’s day-to-day activities to add jottings in Gothic script as diary entries. Over two years he produced 50,000 words spread over fifty A4 booklets. Fantastist spent the blank cheque on them, though he skimmed off as much as 75% for himself of millions. (When Forger later learned of this surtax he readily spilled beans on Fantastist.)
At Stern secrecy remained the watchword. To get some verification very limited graphology tests were done but they were so constrained as to prove nothing, or everything to those who wanted to believe. The Fantastist believed. Herr Decisive was sure of this own genius.
Negotiations with international buyers like News Limited in the UK and Newsweek in the USA brought more people into the secret and doubts were expressed, but dismissed by Fantastist and Decisive as petty jealousies. Decisive had no interest in disproof.
Then Decisive ordered the Stern editors, who had to this point known nothing about this matter, to prepare a special issue. They objected, asking for checks to be made (which would perforce reveal the secret), but were overruled. The international buyers wanted verification but were stalled. They, too, were blinded by the scoop and did not press the matter. At each stage everyone seems to have assumed someone else had verified the diaries. Or so they said in hindsight.
Even as the presses rolled out 75,000 copies of a special, large issue of Stern, a press conference announced the find to the world. It was a fiasco. Faced with a roomful of skeptical journalists some of whom brought along historians from all over the world, the house of cards collapsed. Hugh Trevor-Roper who had authenticated the diaries made a fool of himself, and spent years afterward trying to rewrite this history at least to his own satisfaction. The utterly cynical David Irving played both sides against his bank overdraft and won the lottery that night.
News Limited and Newsweek sold unprecedented numbers of their publications and counted that a commercial success, even while switching to reporting on the hoax that they had generated.
In West Germany there was a police investigation that laid it all bare, sending the little fry: Forger and Fantastist to the slammer – they were held for a time in the same prison specially built for members of the murdering Red Army Faction.
Stern, the Sunday Times, and Newsweek had to show that they took it seriously and scapegoats had to be sacrificed to maintain public confidence in the integrity of the mastheads. [Pause to smell the hypocrisy.]
In each case management, circling the wagons, agreed the scapegoats had to come from down the food chain. Where better than the editors who at each publication had resisted the story until ordered by management to run it. Yet they were the ones fired. ‘They had not resisted enough,’ declared management!
Herr Decisive went on to become the CEO of Dornier Aircraft Corporation. Never ride in a Dornier product is one conclusion to reach from this story. Rupert Murdoch who gave the order to the editor of Sunday Times of London to publish it, over the editor’s objections, was only too happy to fire the editor and blame him for everything while basking in his own genius for the brief circulation increase. The longterm damage to the integrity of journalism bothered no one.
Not even Scott Adams in Dilbert could have concocted a better example of McKinsey management. Credit flows up the corporate chain, and blame flows down.
Harris’s telling is absolutely deadpan. The story is so unbelievable it does not need embellishment.
10 December
1510 The muslim ruler of Goa surrendered on terms to the Christian Portuguese admiral Afonso de Alburquerque who ignored the terms and slaughtered the population of muslims because god told him to do so. Christianity struck again with the sword.
1799 France adopted the meter and the metric system. A meter was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator as it was calculated at the time. Several specimens were made but one survives.
1869 Governor John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the first law in the U.S. explicitly granting women the right to vote. Twenty years later it was explicitly written into the state constitution making Wyoming the Equality State. While that slogan appears on the automobile license plates the logo is a cowboy on a horse. The cowboy is certainly a man. Get it? The one pictured below was hard to find.
1927 The Grand Old Opry made its first radio broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee. It is a foundation stone of Country and Western music. I spent a week in the state archives in Nashville once upon a time.
1948 The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Committee that brought it forward was chaired by Eleanor ‘Everywhere’ Roosevelt. The statement was written by Canadian lawyer John Humphrey. None of the diplomats at the founding of the United Nations wanted anything to do with such an airy fairy project and so they left it to Roosevelt who made it happen, overcoming indifference and hostility. It has been often cited since, justifying much of the work of the International Court of Justice in Den Haag. A biography of Eleanor Everywhere is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
